New Delhi, Jul 19 (IANS): As the first half of the year 2022 comes to an end, Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) has witnessed robust growth in passenger movements with nearly 17 million passengers travelling between January to June 2022.
One of the busiest airports across the globe, CSMIA recorded a significant jump in traffic for the H1 (first half) 2022 of close to 132 per cent as compared to H1 2021. The strong revival of operations in 2022 signals the sector steadily moving towards healthy operations as observed in the pre-Covid times.
In the first half of the year, CSMIA played host to a total of approximately 16.84 million passengers. Approximately 1,30,000 flight movements were recorded across domestic and international destinations and 13.36 million domestic passengers travelled through 97,460 flights. Over 3.48 million passengers flew across 24,910 flights internationally, which is 97 per cent more than that of H1 2021 when close to 1.76 million passenger footfalls were registered.
Moreover, CSMIA catered to the highest international load in June'22 with 8,30,000 passengers observing 124 per cent rise since January'22.
To further amplify the growth in passenger traffic, CSMIA has introduced Abu Dhabi, Najaf, Phuket, Warsaw, and Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to its extensive global connectivity. Air Arabia Abu Dhabi, Fly Baghdad, IndiGo, LOT Polish and VietJet commenced their operations on this route with their maiden flights taking off from CSMIA in the first half of 2022.
With the aim of constantly working towards expanding its connectivity, CSMIA is set to add nine new destinations to its portfolio including Bahrain, Ras Al-Khaimah, Toronto and Helsinki among others.
Moreover, charter flight movements have witnessed a drastic rise in demand as CSMIA facilitated the movement of a total of 17,552 passengers via the General Aviation terminal (GA Terminal) out of which 15,588 accounted for the domestic traffic and 1,964 accounted for the international passenger traffic. With approx. 44 per cent jump in traffic through the GA terminal juxtaposed with the traffic observed in the same period in the year 2021.